It's big-top Beatles, by George

Sir George Martin tells Sunanda Creagh how he adapted the Fab
Four's music for the circus ring.

Dream project ... Sir George Martin.Photo: Narelle Autio

A HUGE sheet of white silk engulfs the crowd, pressing softly
against their faces. Suddenly, it's pulled forward, forming a
mushroom shape as it disappears in the centre of the stage. A
trapeze emerges from a starlit ceiling carrying a beautiful redhead
dressed in white. She smiles broadly and begins to swing as the
familiar strains of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds waft
through the theatre.

If John Lennon was thinking about LSD when he wrote the song, he
couldn't have wished for a more psychedelic visual accompaniment
than this performance by world-famous circus troupe Cirque du
Soleil.

The scene is part of LOVE, a new $150 million production
set to the music of the Beatles. The soundtrack has been developed
by Sir George Martin, who produced most of the band's albums
including the groundbreaking 1967 recording, Sgt Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band. Working with his son, Giles, the 80-year-old
English producer has used the group's master tapes to create fresh
Beatles songs for the circus performers to bend, stretch and juggle
along to.

LOVE opens in Las Vegas tonight. Paul McCartney will be
in the audience, along with Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko
Ono. John Lennon and George Harrison will be there too, in digital
form at least - brought to life by a 90-minute soundtrack which
features previously unheard music, snippets of conversation between
the band members and "mash-ups": musical hybrids created from the
elements of several songs.

On Good Night, for example, drummer Starr warbles along
to a backing track that combines the sound effects from Yellow
Submarine and the drums from Lovely Rita. On another
track, the music and percussion from Tomorrow Never Knows
are sprinkled with the vocals from Within You, Without You.
And Martin has embellished While My Guitar Gently Weeps with
a score for strings.

"We have been very audacious, but that was our brief," says
Martin, at a preview of the show in Las Vegas. McCartney advised
him to stretch boundaries, he said, and he was happy to oblige.

Australian fans will get to hear the music later this year when
the soundtrack album is released. Martin acknowledges that not all
of them will approve.

"I'll probably get a few brickbats for what I have done," he
says. "I am changing the holy grail. There are an awful lot of
very, very fervent Beatle fans who will say that this is wonderful
music that should never be touched. But one of the great burdens
about working with the Beatles' music is that it's so well known it
becomes elevator music. People don't listen to it any more.
What we will try to do with this show is to make the music sound as
though it's live and the Beatles are really here."

The LOVE project began six years ago when Cirque du
Soleil's founder, Guy Laliberte, met Harrison at the Montreal Grand
Prix. Laliberte politely invited Harrison to a party, but didn't
really expect him to turn up.

"He was just starting to come out in public again after being
stabbed and he was also fighting cancer," Laliberte says.

"He said he'd only stay 30 minutes but he came within the first
half an hour and was the last one to leave."

The pair became friends and were soon discussing the possibility
of creating a Cirque-Beatles project.

"George told me that his dream, before all the Beatles go, was
to make another creation."

Apple Corps Ltd, the record company that represents the Beatles,
is notoriously protective of the Beatles brand and has turned down
countless collaborative offers since the company formed in 1968.
This time, however, Harrison and his wife Olivia, McCartney, Starr
and Ono were all on board. After much legal to-ing and fro-ing
("there were a lot of lawyers involved," says Laliberte), the
Martins, pere et fils, began work on the music. The Cirque du
Soleil director, Dominic Champagne, began designing the visual
elements of the show.

"I didn't want to go in the direction of Beatles look-alikes,"
says Champagne. "I focused on emotional touches rather than
historical touches."

In Champagne's world, Lady Madonna is a heavily
pregnant black woman, surrounded by yellow-booted helpers doing a
frenetic South African gumboot dance. The Octopus's Garden
is inhabited by acrobats swinging shooting stars as a fog of dry
ice wafts out from underneath umbrellas.

"The thing is we all have our deep memories of the Beatles. This
is my Yesterday, this is my Eleanor Rigby. Of course,
some people will see this on stage and think, 'Oh, that's not how I
imagined it,"' says Champagne.

Few people knew the Beatles better than Martin, who signed the
four "cheeky devils" to Parlophone in 1962 and produced all their
albums up to 1970's Abbey Road. Does he think Lennon would
have approved of LOVE?

"I think he would think about it what Yoko thinks, because they
were very close," Martin says. "She's been very supportive, quite
critical but in a supportive way. She thinks what we have done is
great."

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